Book Review: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. In ‘Nothing Ever Dies’, Nguyen deals with the extensive ways of knowing and remembering wars in general, and delineates the identity crisis that arises from grappling with what some name the Vietnam War and what others would call the American War in Vietnam.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Irish Nationalists in America by David Brundage
David Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). pp.312. $36.95. £26.49. Irish Nationalists in America provides a thorough survey of centuries of Irish nationalist politics, distinctions in the Irish diaspora, and transnational cooperation. It is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the history of Irish-America, Irish nationalism, and the global Irish. The book is a chronologically organised monograph analysing key events, organisations and leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. The first two chapters address Wolfe Tone and United Irish exiles emigrating to the early American republic. Chapters three, four and five consider Irish nationalists in America throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter three examines how Irish immigrants and second- or third- generation Irish-Americans campaigned to repeal the 1800 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, opposed slavery and supported the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. The next chapter highlights the significance […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Noise Uprising by Michael Denning
As Benedict Anderson’s concept of nationalism relies on the omnipresence of ‘print capitalism’, so Michael Denning here argues that decolonisation depended on an era of ‘sound capitalism’ – a new, urban, plebeian music that circled the world. In this sense, then, while there is no clear moment when the ear was ‘decolonised’, the battle over sound and music was central to the struggle over colonialism.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Saltwater Frontier by Andrew Lipman
Most historical accounts of the colonisation of New England focus on territorial claims made on certain swathes of land between the Hudson River and Cape Cod. Not so Andrew Lipman. Unequivocal in his rejection of ‘surf and turf’ histories, in The Saltwater Frontier Lipman argues that by focusing on the ocean itself as a paradigm of shifting territories, his book offers ‘a new way of thinking about Indian history and a new way of understanding this all-too-familiar region’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley
In ‘An American Genocide’, Benjamin Madley analyses the devastating demographic decline of California Indians. California’s Native American population declined from about 150,000 people to 30,000 in the period 1846-1873. Madley draws heavily on the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. As he explains, this convention provides a powerful analytical tool to help scholars explain what happened to California’s indigenous people.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Jolly Corner and Other Tales by Henry James and N.H. Reeve
The word perhaps most associated with Henry James is ‘difficult’. James, ‘The Master’, wrote weighty tomes—masterpieces of literature—fraught with long-winded, circumlocutory, or rather uniquely expressive, sentences. He is generally considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James aims to provide, for the first time, a full scholarly edition of the novels and tales of this 20th Century American writer.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space by Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space is the sixth collection of essays in a series edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. who is also general editor of the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Continue ReadingBook review: Out of Oakland, Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War by Sean L. Malloy
Sean L. Malloy’s book provides a convincing and engaging history of the internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP). It is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the BPP, black internationalism, and the intersection of issues of race and the Cold War.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Niceness: A Cultural History by Carrie Tirado Bramen
When the current U.S. president, as Bramen puts it in her wide-ranging cultural study, ‘epitomizes the bombastic chauvinism of the Ugly American’ (1), the concept of American niceness sounds at best like an out-dated but innocuous cliché and, at worst, like a dangerous fiction. As American Niceness sets out to prove, the trope of the kind and generous American has yet to fall out of fashion and the role that it has played in disguising a long history of ugly violence might account for its unstinting survival.
Continue ReadingBook Review: James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement by Sarah Rzeszutek Haviland
In this dual biography, Sarah Haviland traces the political and intellectual career of activist couple James and Esther Cooper Jackson. Utilising a combination of personally-conducted oral history interviews and archival material, she argues that an analysis of the couple demonstrates that communist-affiliated activists of the 1930s Popular Front era were able to adapt their activism and influence the trajectory of the modern civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s.
Continue Reading